Open Source, Open Blog

Last night, Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary went on the old experimental computer. There was a bit of trouble with this and I won’t go into details on it (Per request, I’ll let Mrs.Devnet detail this with her review) but after getting things up and running, everything works fine. Look for a final rating for this one sometime next weekend. Mrs.Devnet really digs the look of Gnome…so Ubuntu may have a feather in its hat there.

After finding out the 2 highest rated distros…we’ll go through and review each of them again pitting them against each other using an Advantage and Disadvantage rating system. For instance, hypothetical situation: Red Hat beats SuSe on the area of multimedia…We’d give RH the advantage. So that’s how things will be rated. After that, the winner will be crowned in a huge picture filled final article.

I’ll also have a Q&A session with Mrs.Devnet on where she thinks the distros that didn’t win can improve the most…and we’ll talk about each one specifically.

Then…I myself will take an in depth look at the winner and the runner up and hit some areas that more experienced users might be concerned with. This will be a separate review as well. I’ll also post a ’roundup’ of all the reviews…really, just a single entry with all the links to the distros and their final ratings.

Last but not least, we’ll have some cool badges for display that link back to the crowned winner review. Some examples of the badges might look like this (I’m terrible at graphics…so if there are any artists out there that would like to lend their talents…please feel free to contact me):

So, lot’s on the horizon…stay tuned and thanks for reading. Suggestions? Please post away and let me know what is on your mind!

Why I feel this experiment is so great:
It’s run by both a Linux expert and a Linux newbye. Having the expert onboard ensures the respect of the “community”. Having the newbye emphasizes “real life” issues related to adoption by the masses as “home computer OS”.
I am myself inbetween, being IT specialist and having used Unix, programmed in C, assembly etc at university 10 years ago. I have been really amazed by the number of challenges that Linux (or some distro) pose to the user for the seemingly most basic needs (font display, PDF rendering and search, Web surfing, multimedia playing)

http://thisone devnet

Thanks for your support! We’re trying to maintain a new user attitude for each distribution throughout. The top two should be announced within the next 1 1/2 weeks so stay tuned close for more on this!

What do you get when you take 1 new Linux user with zero Linux experience, add 5 distros and stir? You get the Linux Blog experiment, that’s what. What makes these reviews different from all other reviews is that they are done by an avid Windows user.